[pt] Este estudo apresenta um modelo de programação inteira mista para a roteirização de navios com controle de estoque nos portos para a movimentação de múltiplos produtos com uma frota heterogênea. O modelo contempla a possibilidade de transformação de produtos dentro de navios, o que representa uma flexibilidade para o modelo optar por qual produto utilizar para atender um cliente com demanda com qualidade flexível. Esta habilidade não foi encontrada em nenhum outro estudo. Ele também combina o atendimento de demandas obrigatórias com opcionais. O modelo então é aplicado em um caso real de movimentação de derivados escuros de petróleo em uma empresa de petróleo brasileira, cujo modelo atual utilizado apresenta problemas que dificultam seu uso. Devido ao longo tempo que leva para obter a solução ótima para estes tipos de modelos, são utilizadas as matheurísticas de relax-and-fix e fix-and-optimize para obter soluções boas em um tempo reduzido. São apresentados experimentos computacionais em uma série de cenários para validar a qualidade das soluções encontradas pelos métodos propostos, testando diferentes configurações e discretizações de tempo. Os resultados apresentados comprovam a superioridade dos métodos em comparação com o modelo matemático puro. O modelo proposto apresentou grande potencial de substituir o modelo atual da empresa e para alcançar a melhoria pretendida na programação dos navios. / [en] This dissertation presents a mixed integer program model to solve a ship routing and scheduling with stock control in ports, also known as maritime inventory routing. This model considers a heterogeneous fleet, carrying multiples products. It also has the ability to transform one product into another inside ships. This aspect allows the model to choose which product it wishes to deliver to a client with a less restrict quality specification in his demand. No model presented in other studies has this capability. Another possibility covered by this model is to combine mandatory demands with optional ones. The model is applied to a real case of maritime transportation of dirty oil products in a Brazilian oil company, whose current model has a series of small problems that hinders its use. Due to the long time it takes to get the optimal solution, the relax-and-fix and fix-andoptimize heuristics are used to get good solutions in a reduced time. With the use of computational experiments in a series of scenarios, it has proved the quality of the solutions found by the proposed methods, testing different configurations and discretizations of time. The results presented prove the superiority of the methods in comparison to the pure mathematical model. The proposed model has shown great potential to replace the current one and to achieve the improvement for the ship routing intended by the company.

Complex distributed systems such as distributed information flows systems which continuously acquire manipulate and disseminate information across an enterprise's distributed sites and machines, and distributed server applications co-deployed in one or multiple shared data centers, with each of them having different performance/availability requirements that vary over time and competing with each other for the shared resources, have been playing a more serious role in industry and society now. Consequently, it becomes more important for enterprise scale IT infrastructure to provide timely and sustained/reliable delivery and processing of service requests. This hasn't become easier, despite more than 30 years of progress in distributed computer connectivity, availability and reliability, if not more difficult~cite{ReliableDistributedSys}, because of many reasons. Some of them are, the increasing complexity of enterprise scale computing infrastructure; the distributed nature of these systems which make them prone to failures, e.g., because of inevitable Heisenbugs in these complex distributed systems; the need to consider diverse and complex business objectives and policies including risk preference and attitudes in enterprise computing; the issues of performance and availability conflicts, varying importance of sub-systems in an enterprise's distributed infrastructure which compete for resource in currently typical shared environment; and the best effort nature of resources such as network resources, which implies resource availability itself an issue, etc. This thesis proposes a novel business policy-driven risk-based automated availability management which uses an automated decision engine to make various availability decisions and meet business policies while optimizing overall system utility, uses utility theory to capture users' risk attitudes, and address the potentially conflicting business goals and resource demands in enterprise scale distributed systems. For the critical and complex enterprise applications, since a key contributor to application utility is the time taken to recover from failures, we develop a novel proactive fault tolerance approach, which uses online methods for failure prediction to dynamically determine the acceptable amounts of additional processing and communication resources to be used (i.e., costs) to attain certain levels of utility and acceptable delays in failure recovery. Since resource availability itself is often not guaranteed in typical shared enterprise IT environments, this thesis provides IQ-Paths with probabilistic service guarantee, to address the dynamic network behavior in realistic enterprise computing environment. The risk-based formulation is used as an effective way to link the operational guarantees expressed by utility and enforced by the PGOS algorithm with the higher level business objectives sought by end users. Together, this thesis proposes novel availability management framework and methods for large-scale enterprise applications and systems, with the goal to provide different levels of performance/availability guarantees for multiple applications and sub-systems in a complex shared distributed computing infrastructure. More specifically, this thesis addresses the following problems. For data center environments, (1) how to provide availability management for applications and systems that vary in both resource requirements and in their importance to the enterprise, based both on operational level quantities and on business level objectives; (2) how to deal with managerial policies such as risk attitude; and (3) how to deal with the tradeoff between performance and availability, given limited resources in a typical data center. Since realistic business settings extend beyond single data centers, a second set of problems addressed in this thesis concerns predictable and reliable operation in wide area settings. For such systems, we explore (4) how to provide high availability in widely distributed operational systems with low cost fault tolerance mechanisms, and (5) how to provide probabilistic service guarantees given best effort network resources.

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No. of bitstreams: 1 TeseMGSF.pdf: 2372267 bytes, checksum: 33d2a1fb8316befd39ea4c2aa4e6a69e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-01 / Outra / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / The object of this study is the routing and scheduling problem of vessels with pickup and delivery and time windows in the oil industry. A case study was performed in a Brazilian oil industry that produces crude oil in o shore platforms, that is, located in the ocean, and transports to the terminals located in the Brazilian coast. Then, it was proposed a mixed integer model to represent the problem adequately and for this, a detailed analysis of the real problem in order to know all its characteristics and consider some simplifying assumptions. Therefore, to the pickup and delivery problem with time windows present in the literature were aggregated other speci c restrictions of the case study, for example, multiple depots, ship mooring restrictions, exible draft and dynamic positioning. Besides that, the eet is heterogeneous related to capacity, LOA (length overall), dynamic positioning and velocity. In practice, in general there are no identical vessels. This problem can be represented as a combinatorial optimization model, which belongs to the NP-hard class and its solution is a challenging in practice depending on the size of the real problems. Then, were proposed several exact branch-and-cut methods based on models with 2 and 3-index variables for routing problems with pickup and delivery and time windows to solve speci cally the Brazilian oil industry problem. Finally, we proposed a branch-and-price method, which includes all characteristics of the problem in oil industry. In summary, the main contributions of this thesis are related to the study and modeling of this problem in practice, and the proposal and development of exact solution methods to solve it, based on branch-and-cut and branch-and-price. The performance of the mathematical model in optimization software and the exact methods were veri ed using a real data set provided by the company. Results show that these approaches may be e ective to solve problems of moderate size in real situations. / O objeto de estudo deste trabalho é o problema de roteamento e programação de navios com coleta e entrega e janelas de tempo na indústria petrolífera. Foi realizado um estudo de caso com uma empresa petrolífera brasileira que produz óleo cru em plataformas o shore, isto é, localizadas no oceano e os transporta até os terminais localizados na costa brasileira. Então, foi proposto um modelo de programação inteira mista para representar o problema adequadamente e para isso, foi necessária uma análise detalhada do problema real, com o intuito de conhecer todas as suas características e considerar hipóteses simpli cadoras. Desta maneira, ao problema de coleta e entrega e janelas de tempo da literatura foram agregadas outras restrições especí cas do problema do estudo de caso como, por exemplo, múltiplos depósitos, restrições de atracação dos navios, calado exível e posicionamento dinâmico. Além disso, a frota de navios é heterogênea em relação à capacidade, LOA (length overall ), posicionamento dinâmico e velocidade. Na prática, em geral não existem navios iguais. Este problema pode ser representado como um modelo de otimização combinatória que pertence à classe NP-difícil e sua solução é bastante desa adora na prática em função do tamanho dos problemas reais. Depois, foram propostos vários métodos do tipo branch-and-cut baseados em modelos com variáveis de 2 e 3-índices para problemas de roteamento com coleta e entrega e janelas de tempo para resolver especi camente o problema da empresa brasileira. E por m, foi proposto um método do tipo branch-and-price, o qual abrange todas as características do problema da indústria petrolífera. Em síntese, as principais contribuições desta tese referem-se ao estudo e modelagem deste problema na prática, e a proposta e desenvolvimento de métodos de solução exatos para resolvê-lo, baseados em branch-and-cut e branch-and-price. O desempenho do modelo matemático em softwares de otimização e também dos métodos exatos propostos foi veri cado usando-se exemplares reais fornecidos pela empresa. Os resultados mostram que essas abordagens podem ser efetivas para resolver problemas de tamanho moderado em situações reais.

Τα οπτικά δίκτυα αποτελούν την αποδοτικότερη επιλογή όσον αφορά την εγκατάσταση ευρυζωνικών δικτύων κορμού, καθώς παρουσιάζουν μοναδικά χαρακτηριστικά μετάδοσης. Διαθέτουν τεράστιο εύρος ζώνης, υψηλή αξιοπιστία, ενώ επίσης έχουν μειωμένο κόστος μετάδοσης ανά bit πληροφορίας σε σχέση με τα υπόλοιπα ενσύρματα δίκτυα. Σημαντικές ερευνητικές προσπάθειες έχουν επικεντρωθεί στις προοπτικές μετάβασης από τα παραδοσιακά στατικά δίκτυα κυκλωμάτων, στα οποία χρησιμοποιείται από-σημείο-σε-σημείο οπτική μετάδοση, σε δίκτυα μετάδοσης δεδομένων που προσφέρουν δυναμική και γρήγορη επαναρύθμιση των οπτικών μονοπατιών και πρόσβαση σε χωρητικότητες κάτω του ενός μήκους κύματος, ανάλογα με τις απαιτήσεις των χρηστών και των εκάστοτε εφαρμογών. Τα τελευταία χρόνια υπάρχει η τάση για δημιουργία δυναμικών και επαναρυθμιζόμενων οπτικών δικτύων μεταγωγής κυκλώματος (Optical Circuit Switching), τα οποία θα βασίζονται σε διαφανείς κόμβους μεταγωγής. Η μονάδα μεταγωγής των δικτύων οπτικής μεταγωγής κυκλώματος είναι τα οπτικά μονοπάτια (lightpaths) και το βασικό πρόβλημα βελτιστοποίησης που σχετίζεται με την αποδοτική εκμετάλλευση της χωρητικότητας τέτοιων δικτύων είναι το πρόβλημα της δρομολόγησης και ανάθεσης μήκους κύματος (Routing and Wavelength Assignment - RWA). Στα αμιγώς διαφανή (transparent) οπτικά δίκτυα κυκλώματος η μετάδοση του σήματος υποβαθμίζεται από μια σειρά φυσικών εξασθενήσεων (physical impairments), σε σημείο που η εγκατάσταση ενός οπτικού μονοπατιού να μην είναι αποδεκτή. Για την αντιμετώπιση αυτού του προβλήματος στην παρούσα διατριβή προτείνουμε αλγόριθμους οι οποίοι λαμβάνουν υπόψη τους τις φυσικές εξασθενήσεις (Impairment Aware RWA ή ΙΑ-RWA algorithms) τόσο για στατική όσο και για δυναμική κίνηση. Συγκεκριμένα, παρουσιάζουμε έναν IA-RWA αλγόριθμο για στατική κίνηση, ο οποίος βασίζεται στην τεχνική της LP-χαλάρωσης και χρησιμοποιεί αποδοτικές μεθόδους για την παραγωγή ακεραίων λύσεων. Εκφράζουμε τις φυσικές εξασθενήσεις μέσω επιπλέον περιορισμών στην LP μοντελοποίηση του RWA προβλήματος, επιτυγχάνοντας την διαστρωματική βελτιστοποίηση (cross-layer optimization) πάνω στο φυσικό επίπεδο και στο επίπεδο δικτύου. Στη συνέχεια, προτείνουμε έναν IA-RWA αλγόριθμο πολλαπλών κριτηρίων (multi-cost) για δυναμική κίνηση. Ορίζουμε ένα διάνυσμα από κόστη για κάθε σύνδεσμο και τις πράξεις συσχέτισης αυτών, ώστε να μπορούμε να υπολογίσουμε το διάνυσμα από κόστη ενός μονοπατιού και μέσω αυτού να αξιολογήσουμε την ποιότητα μετάδοσης των διαθέσιμων μηκών κύματος του μονοπατιού. Για την εξυπηρέτηση μιας νέας αίτησης σύνδεσης, ο αλγόριθμος πολλαπλών κριτηρίων υπολογίζει το σύνολο των μη κυριαρχούμενων μονοπατιών, από την πηγή στο ζητούμενο προορισμό, και μετά εφαρμόζει μια πολιτική για να επιλέξει το βέλτιστο οπτικό μονοπάτι. Προτείνουμε και αξιολογούμε την απόδοση μιας σειράς από πολιτικές επιλογής, η κάθε μια από τις οποίες ουσιαστικά αντιστοιχεί σε έναν διαφορετικό δυναμικό IA-RWA αλγόριθμο. Στη συνέχεια, στρέφουμε την προσοχή μας στα δίκτυα οπτικής μεταγωγής καταιγισμών (Optical Burst Switching – OBS), τα οποία θεωρούνται ότι αποτελούν το επόμενο στάδιο των δικτύων οπτικής μεταγωγής κυκλώματος, όπου η δέσμευση της χωρητικότητας γίνεται για μικρότερο χρονικό διάστημα. Στα OBS δίκτυα, τα πακέτα που έχουν τον ίδιο προορισμό και παρόμοιες απαιτήσεις ποιότητας υπηρεσίας συναθροίζονται σε καταιγισμούς (bursts). Οι καταιγισμοί μεταδίδονται πάνω από αμιγώς οπτικά μονοπάτια, τα οποία ρυθμίζονται με τη χρήση πακέτων ελέγχου που μεταδίδονται πριν από τους αντίστοιχους καταιγισμούς και τα οποία επεξεργάζονται ηλεκτρονικά οι ενδιάμεσοι κόμβοι. Επικεντρώνουμε την προσοχή μας σε δυο βασικά στοιχεία ενός δικτύου οπτικής μεταγωγής καταιγισμών, την διαδικασία συναρμολόγησης καταιγισμών και τα πρωτόκολλα σηματοδοσίας, και παραθέτουμε δύο προτάσεις για την αποδοτική ανάθεσης χωρητικότητας σε αυτά τα δίκτυα. Συγκεκριμένα, προτείνουμε και αξιολογούμε ένα νέο αλγόριθμο συναρμολόγησης καταιγισμών που βασίζεται στη μέση καθυστέρηση των πακέτων που αποτελούν έναν καταιγισμό. Δείχνουμε ότι ο προτεινόμενος αλγόριθμος συναρμολόγησης καταιγισμών μειώνει την διασπορά της καθυστέρησης των πακέτων (packet delay jitter), η οποία είναι σημαντική για μια σειρά από εφαρμογές. Στην συνέχεια προτείνουμε ένα νέο αμφίδρομο (two-way) πρωτόκολλο σηματοδοσίας που βασίζεται στις μελλοντικές (in-advance) και χαλαρωμένες χρονικά (relaxed timed) δεσμεύσεις χωρητικότητας. Στο προτεινόμενο πρωτόκολλο, κατά τη φάση εγκατάστασης της σύνδεσης οι δεσμεύσεις χωρητικότητας γίνονται για χρονικό διάστημα μεγαλύτερο από το χρόνο μετάδοσης του καταιγισμού, ώστε να αυξηθεί η πιθανότητα επιτυχούς εγκατάστασης στους επόμενους συνδέσμους του μονοπατιού. Συγκρίνουμε το προτεινόμενο πρωτόκολλο με τυπικά πρωτόκολλα που έχουν προταθεί στη βιβλιογραφία και δείχνουμε οτι μπορεί να χρησιμοποιηθεί για την παροχή διαφοροποιημένης ποιότητα υπηρεσιών (QoS differentiation) στους χρήστες του OBS δικτύου. Στη συνέχεια, εξετάζουμε το πρόβλημα της δρομολόγησης και του χρονοπρογραμματισμού συνδέσεων με χαλαρό - μη συγκεκριμένο χρόνο εκκίνησης, πρόβλημα που εμφανίζεται υπό ελαφρώς διαφορετική μορφή σε δίκτυα οπτικής μεταγωγής κυκλώματος, οπτικής μεταγωγής καταιγισμών αλλά και μεταγωγής πακέτου. Η εξυπηρέτηση αυτών των συνδέσεων γίνεται μέσω μελλοντικών δεσμεύσεων χωρητικότητας, τρόπος ο οποίος είναι τυπικός για να παρεχθεί εγγυημένη ποιότητα υπηρεσίας (QoS) στους χρήστες ενός δικτύου. Θεωρούμε ότι μας δίνεται μια σύνδεση με γνωστή πηγή και προορισμό, γνωστό ή άγνωστο όγκο δεδομένων και γνωστό ρυθμό μετάδοσης και ζητείται να αποφασίσουμε το μονοπάτι που θα ακολουθήσουν τα δεδομένα και το χρόνο που θα αρχίσει η μετάδοση. Διακριτοποιούμε το χρόνο και χρησιμοποιούμε κατάλληλα διανύσματα ως δομές δεδομένων για να αναπαραστήσουμε τη διαθεσιμότητα των συνδέσμων του δικτύου ως συνάρτηση του χρόνου. Χρησιμοποιούμε αυτά τα διανύσματα σε ένα αλγόριθμο πολλαπλών κριτηρίων για τη δρομολόγηση και το χρονοπρογραμματισμό των συνδέσεων. Αρχικά, παρουσιάζουμε έναν αλγόριθμο πολλαπλών κριτηρίων μη πολυωνυμικής πολυπλοκότητας, ο οποίος βασίζεται στην έννοια των μη-κυριαρχούμενων μονοπατιών. Μετά προτείνουμε δύο ευριστικούς αλγορίθμους πολυωνυμικής πολυπλοκότητας, ορίζοντας κατάλληλες σχέσεις ψευδο-κυριαρχίας οι οποίες μειώνουν το χώρο των λύσεων. Επίσης, προτείνουμε ένα μηχανισμό branch-and-bound, ο οποίος μπορεί να μειώσει το χώρο λύσεων στην περίπτωση που χρησιμοποιούμε μια συγκεκριμένη συνάρτηση βελτιστοποίησης για όλες τις συνδέσεις. Η απόδοση των προτεινόμενων αλγορίθμων αξιολογήθηκε σε ένα δίκτυο οπτικής μεταγωγής καταιγισμών, ωστόσο τα συμπεράσματα και η εφαρμοσιμότητα του προτεινόμενου αλγόριθμου επεκτείνεται και σε άλλου είδους οπτικά δίκτυα. Τέλος, εξετάζουμε το πρόβλημα του συνδυασμένου χρονοπρογραμματισμού των δικτυακών και υπολογιστικών πόρων που απαιτούνται για την εκτέλεση μιας διεργασίας σε ένα Δίκτυο Πλέγματος (Grid Network). Τα Δίκτυα Πλέγματος θεωρούνται το επόμενο βήμα στον τομέα των κατανεμημένων συστημάτων, εισάγοντας την έννοια της “κοινής” χρήσης γεωγραφικά κατανεμημένων και ετερογενών πόρων (υπολογιστικών, αποθηκευτικών, δικτυακών, κλπ.). Υποθέτουμε ότι η εκτέλεση μιας διεργασίας αποτελείται από δύο διαδοχικά στάδια: (α) Τη μεταφορά των δεδομένων εισόδου της διεργασίας από μια αποθηκευτική μονάδα σε μια συστοιχία υπολογιστών (cluster), (β) την εκτέλεση της διεργασίας στη συστοιχία υπολογιστών. Επεκτείνουμε τον αλγόριθμο πολλαπλών κριτηρίων για τη δρομολόγηση και το χρονοπρογραμματισμό συνδέσεων που περιγράφηκε προηγουμένως, έτσι ώστε να χειρίζεται με ένα συνδυασμένο τρόπο δικτυακούς και υπολογιστικούς πόρους για την εκτέλεση των διεργασιών. Ο προτεινόμενος αλγόριθμος επιστρέφει: (i) τη συστοιχία υπολογιστών όπου θα εκτελεστεί η διεργασία, (ii) το μονοπάτι το οποίο θα ακολουθήσουν τα δεδομένα εισόδου, (iii) τη χρονική στιγμή εκκίνησης μετάδοσης και (iv) τη χρονική στιγμή εκκίνησης εκτέλεσης της διεργασίας στη συστοιχία υπολογιστών. Ξεκινάμε παρουσιάζοντας έναν αλγόριθμο μη πολυωνυμικού χρόνου και μετά, αφού μειώσουμε κατάλληλα το χώρο λύσεων, δίνουμε έναν ευριστικό αλγόριθμο πολυωνυμικής πολυπλοκότητας. / Optical networks have developed rapidly over the last ten years and are widely used in core networks due to their superior transmission characteristics. Optical networks provide huge available capacity that can be efficiently utilized using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and high reliability at the lowest cost per bit ratio when compared to the other wired and wireless networking solutions. Much research has focused on ways to evolve from the typical point-to-point opaque WDM networks that are currently employed in the core to optical networks that are dynamically and quickly reconfigurable and can provide on-demand services to users at subwavelength granularity according to users’ requirements. The most common architecture utilized for establishing communication in WDM optical networks is wavelength routing that fall in the general category of Optical Circuit Switched (OCS) networks. The switched entities in OCS networks are the lightpaths and the basic optimization problem that is related to the efficient allocation of bandwidth is the routing and wavelength assignment problem (RWA). The current optical technology employed in core networks is point-to-point transmission, where the signal is regenerated at every intermediate node via optical-electronic-optical (OEO) conversion. During the recent few years, the trend clearly shows an evolution towards low-cost and high capacity all-optical transparent networks that do not utilize OEO. In transparent OCS networks the signal of a lightpath remains in the optical domain and its quality deteriorates due to a series of physical layer impairments (PLIs). These PLIs may degrade the received signal quality to the extent that the bit-error rate (BER) at the receiver may be so high that signal detection may be infeasible for some lightpaths. To address this problem we proposed algorithms that take into account the PLIs, usually referred in the literature as Impairment Aware RWA or ΙΑ-RWA algorithms, for both offline (static) and online (dynamic) traffic. In particular we propose an IA-RWA algorithm for static traffic that is based on an LP-relaxation formulation and use various efficient methods to obtain integer solutions. The physical layer impairments are included as additional constraint in the LP formulation of the RWA problem, yielding a cross-layer optimization solution between the network and the physical layers. We then proceed and propose a multi-cost IA-RWA algorithm for dynamic traffic. We define a cost vector per link and associative operators to combine these vectors so as to calculate the cost vector of a path. The parameters of these cost vectors are chosen so as to enable the quick and efficient calculation of the quality of transmission of candidate lightpaths. To serve a connection request, the proposed multi-cost algorithm calculates the set of so called non-dominated paths from the given source to the given destination, and then applies an optimization policy to choose the optimal lightpath. We propose and evaluate various optimization policies that correspond to different online IA-RWA algorithms. We then turn our attention to Optical Burst Switched (OBS) networks, which are regarded as the next step from the OCS paradigm towards a more dynamic core network that can provide on demand subwavelength services to users. In OBS networks, the packets that have the same destination and similar quality of service requirements are aggregated into bursts at the ingress nodes. When a burst is aggregated, a control packet is transmitted and is electronically processed at intermediate nodes so as to configure them for the burst that will pass transparently afterwards. We focus on two key elements of an OBS network, and in particular the burst aggregation (or burstification) process and the signaling protocol, and we propose two solutions for the efficient allocation of bandwidth in OBS networks. We propose and evaluate a novel burst assembly algorithm that is based on the average delay of the packets that comprise a burst. We show that the proposed algorithm decreases the packet delay jitter among the packets, which is important for a number of applications, including real-time, video and audio streaming, and TCP applications. Next we propose a two-way reservation signaling protocol that utilizes in-advance and relaxed timed reservation of the bandwidth. In the connection establishment phase of the proposed protocol, bandwidth reservations can exceed the duration of burst transmission (thus, relaxing the timed reservations), so as to increase the acceptance probability for the rest of the path. By controlling the degree of the relaxed timed reservations the protocol can also provide service differentiation to the users. Next we examine the problem of routing and scheduling of connections with flexible starting time in networks that support advance reservations. This problem can arise in slightly different settings in Optical Circuit Switched, Optical Burst Switched, and Optical Packet Switched networks. Such connection requests are served through advanced reservations, a process which is used to provide quality of service to users. We assume that for a connection request we are given the source, the destination, and the size of the data to be transferred with a given rate, and we are asked to provide the path and the time that the transmission should start so as to optimize a certain performance metric. We discretize the time and we use appropriate data structures (in the form of vectors) to map the utilization of the links as a function of time. We use these vectors as cost parameters in a multi-cost algorithm. We initially present a multicost algorithm of non-polynomial complexity that uses a full domination relation between paths. We then propose two mechanisms to prune the solution space in order to obtain polynomial complexity algorithms. In the first mechanism we define pseudo-domination relations that are weaker than the full domination relation. We also propose a branch-and-bound extension to the optimum algorithm that can be used for a given specific optimization function. The performance of the multicost algorithm and its variations are evaluated in an OBS network, but this does not limit the applicability of the algorithm and the conclusions can be extended in the other optical networking paradigms. Finally, we examine the problem of joint reservation of communication and computation resources that are required by a task in a Grid Network. Grid Networks are considered as the next step in distributed systems, introducing the concept of shared usage of geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources (computation, storage, communication, etc.). We assume that the task execution consists of two phases: (a) the transfer of the input data from a data storage resource, or the scheduler to a computation resource (cluster), (b) the execution of a program at the cluster. We extend the multicost algorithm for the routing and scheduling of connections, outlined above, so as to handle the reservation of computation resources as its last leg. In this way the proposed algorithm performs a joint optimization for the communication and computation part required by a task and returns: (i) the cluster to the execute the task, (ii) the path to route the input data, (iii) the time to start the transmission of data, and (iv) the time to start the execution of the task. We start by presenting an algorithm of non-polynomial complexity and then by appropriately pruning the solution space, we give a heuristic algorithm of polynomial complexity. We show that in a Grid network where the tasks are cpu- and data-intensive important performance benefits can be obtained by jointly optimizing the use of the communication and computation resources.